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I know what you’re saying, “Why not try Fedora 8?” Well, I already had Fedora 7 burned, so I figure I’d try it.

This is all specific to the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, so here’s the quick analysis on how they booted:

Neither managed the fan (big detriment). CentOS 5 does control this fan, and that makes me think that newer Linux kernels have abandoned this laptop’s ACPI fan control. I also say this because the newest Ubuntu 7.10 kernel has this same problem. If I boot with the slightly older kernel, I have no problem — and a mostly silent fan. I’m worried about what’s going to happen in a year of so when most distros start using these newer kernels.

It probably means I’m going to have to start modifying and compiling my own kernels.

Anyway, Fedora 7 didn’t have any panels or menus. What are you supposed to do with it? I didn’t linger long enough to find out.

OpenSUSE 10.3 looks nice. I like the green. My static IP configured OK. It took a bit longer to do — there are more screens to go through, but I had networking and was able to launch a few apps. OpenSUSE has a strange menu arrangement. you click on the lower panel and get a smallish menu with about five apps. You can click a button for more, and then a bunch come up. It looks a lot different than the usual GNOME menu. I won’t say I don’t like it just yet.

If the fan had fallen silent, I would be thinking about installing openSUSE, but since that didn’t happen, I won’t.

In other news, I tried to run cron jobs to control the fan in Puppy, Damn Small Linux and FreeSBIE. I am not geek enough for this. I think the solution lies at the kernel level, but what the hell do I know?

A pretty good review from IT Toolbox looks at a whole bunch of Linuxes on a good smattering of hardware. Reviewer Mike Kavis really likes Ubuntu and Kubuntu — because they work. He also has good things to say about Mepis and PCLinuxOS, and not-so-good things about Fedora and OpenSUSE.

I agree, for the most part. I’ve never been a big Kubuntu fan. If I’m going to use KDE, I want it to be really KDE-like. That means Slackware or Debian … or SimplyMepis if I had a whole lot of power (Mepis is simply slow, in my tests). Mike, however, considers Mepis to be faster than Vista. I don’t know what that says about Vista … or Mepis.

Maybe it’s time for another try at SimplyMepis on my Gateway laptop. But Debian Etch and Ubuntu Gutsy are running so well, I’m loathe to tinker with success.